Materials for Advent (2013) — Day 6

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. (Acts 10:38)

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

The traditional French Christmas carol known as Les Anges dans nos campagnes (“Angels in our countryside”) was anonymously composed in Languedoc, France. It was translated into English by James Chadwick, the Roman Catholic bishop of Hexham and Newcastle (in northeastern England) in 1862.

Here is the Norwegian soprano Sissel — Sissel Kyrkjebø — to give her her full name, performing Mack Wilberg’s arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard on High” with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: